McCullough's Pre-K Blog

Oh What A Year!!!

We have truly enjoyed this class and seeing the wonderful growth in these precious children. It is very rewarding for teachers to have the opportunity to see children grow socially, cognitively, aesthetically, physically, and begin to understand themselves as learners. Thinking back to August where we baked, lost, and found that elusive Gingerbread Man and the excitement and joy this class brought to that and all our class adventures was special. There have been many examples of their wonderful attitude and none better than the Olympics where the Pre-K classes come together to create a most amazing production with lasting memories for the children.
The children have adopted the “grow your brain attitude”. They delight in discussing things they couldn’t do in the beginning of school only to find by trying over and over they were able to learn to grown their brains and develop a “growth mindset”. A perfect example of this would be learning to master the monkey bars. They realized there are many examples of how they have “grown their brains” at home too. During the Responsibility Unit they delighted in discovering things they could now do.
As the year ends, we find ourselves in Brazil learning about the amazing Amazon Rain Forest. As usual this study has prompted many questions and their same excitement and love for learning has prevailed. Can domestic cats swim was our last research question. We learned the jaguar could climb trees and swim and therefore wondered if a domestic cat could also swim. Now we know. Cats don’t hate being in water but can swim in a dire emergency!

The boys and girls were thrilled to be your host and hostess at the Muffins for Mom party. They were so proud of the songs and dances they performed for you. This was a perfect place to show off what they had learned in Music with Miss Kathryn. The End of the Year Party was a big success and who doesn’t like ice cream sundaes? The autographed Frisbees are a wonderful memento from Pre-K.
We will miss these children but we are excited about their tomorrows. Their excitement for school and learning is special.
Miss Shann and Miss Keith are retiring and will be on to other adventures. We will all miss them but hopefully they will return for many visits. We hope you have a wonderful summer and we look forward to hearing about the adventures in Kindergarten.

We started the week off with a visit from Young Audiences. Miss Wendy performed the classic, Cinderella, through storytelling and music. Sometimes she would just burst into song to tell part of the story. She told us this is called a musical and involves not only the author who wrote the book, but a composer who created the music. She did all the voices for the characters. It was quite wonderful. Some of the boys and girls were invited to come up and perform with her. We have quite a few aspiring actors in our midst. We are learning many interesting facts about music and the role it plays in our lives. The 6th graders will be performing the opera, Carmen, next week. Miss Kathryn told us the story about Carmen and shared some of the music with us. We are looking forward to seeing the real thing next week.

We had much excitement this week when we met the baby chicks. The Kindergarten classes do a “chick” project every year. They get eggs and put them in an incubator. The boys and girls “take care” of the eggs by keeping the incubator warm and turning the eggs regularly. 5 days ago the eggs hatched and now there are about 16 little chicks in the Kindergarten classrooms. The chickmasters, Russell, McKenzie, and Nathan brought 5 little chicks to our room. We put newspaper on the good listening rug and we sat in a very tight circle. Then the chickmasters put the chicks on the rug and they ran all around. They were tweeting and running up to us. We were allowed to pet them, but we had to do it very softly so as not to hurt them. We can’t wait until we get to Kindergarten and become chickmasters ourselves.

As we enter into the end of the school year there are many “last” events coming up. We are learning what the word “bittersweet” means. The same activity can conjure up happy and sad feelings at the same time. Anish’s dad was our last Mystery Reader this week. Anish is our last Friend of the Week. He wants to be a policeman when he grows up and his favorite food is mac and cheese. We had our last Friend of the Week family celebration with Anish and his family. We have so enjoyed all our special events and having our parents, grandparents and siblings come to our classroom. Our Olympic celebrations were so grand and certainly that is one event that we will always remember. Perhaps nothing brings up bittersweet feelings more than Brown Bear. As a child’s name is drawn out of the green box, they realize this is the last visit they will have with their favorite magic bear. They are giving serious thought to having a farewell party for Mr. Brown Bear!! Our end of the year feelings are also mixed with excitement as we look forward to Kindergarten. We know that this too will be a fun adventure. We have wonderful Pre-K memories and soon we will be making Kindergarten memories.

We have introduced the Rainforrest Unit and we are very excited. Stay tuned for more news.

Last week in art we made boats again, but this time we used modeling clay. It was really hard molding that clay to make something that we hope will float. After we finally got our boats the way we wanted, we put flags on them. This week we got to put on our boots and go down to the creek to see if our boats would float. Most of them successfully floated all the way down. There were a few that sank in the water. We figured out that these boats didn’t float because there walls were not high enough. It was so much fun and we were very proud that we had designed such wonderful workable boats. After our “boat race”, we discussed how we thought we could build even better boats. Many interesting ideas emerged from that discussion.

Spring always brings up planting, whether it’s flowers, trees, crops, or anything that grows. We have discussed what is more important to plants, water or sun. We’re doing an experiment in our classroom around planting. Miss Anne brought in 3 little plants. One plant will get water and light, one plant will get only water, and one plant will get only light. We have predicted what we think will happen to each plant. The census of opinion is that the plant with no water would wilt. At the end of the first week we observed that all the plants looked basically the same. Stay tuned as we continue our experiment.

Next week will be another busy week. Our teachers are looking forward to seeing each of you at conference time. It is our pleasure to share the wonderful growth we have observed with each child. Remember, on Thursday, May 3, the boys and girls do not come to school.

This has been a fun filled week with many adventures the children have enjoyed. We had an exciting Earth Day assembly presented by the Second Grade. Dr. Seuss’s wonderful story, The Lorax, was the theme. What a great way to illustrate the need to protect our trees. Our children were familiar with this delightful conservation story because Reid’s Mom read it when she was our Mystery Reader. For a perfect finale all The Trinity Students joined the Second Grade in the Lorax dance!

We created an amazing class story this week. We formed a circle and Sullivan started by saying, “Once there was a fire breathing dragon. We continued around the circle giving each student an opportunity to adding to our expanding story. Our story had characters, location, plot, and a wonderfully logical conclusion. We ended our story by Neema saying, “They all lived happily ever after.” This was a new experience and the children did a super job of creating an interesting story using their ability to collaborate and cooperate. By working together they wrote an interesting story and we will definitely do this again.

Jonathan’s cousins, Noah and Gabriel, our UK friends visited us this week. They attend the Hall School in London. Noah is in year 1, and Gabriel is in year 3. They are in Atlanta for their spring break and we are excited at the prospect of this visit. The children are all abuzz with questions they want to ask. We reviewed our Power Point about The United Kingdom to refresh our memory. Noah and Gabriel did a short presentation on the Promethean Board. Noah read his Friend of the Week chart we prepared back during the Olympics. The children have many questions for our London friends. What a wonderful treat for our class and these delightful boys.

Grace is our Friend of the Week and we have found she likes to go to Pawley’s Island and her favorite color is purple. She wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up and she will look after sick horses.

We hope everyone had a nice Easter Break. We came back ready to go and started our day off with a fun science project. We have been talking about and experimenting with the concept of floating and sinking. So Miss Anna gave each of us a piece of aluminum to create the shape of a boat. The object was to make it so it would float. Then we added small marbles to it to see how many we could add before it started sinking. We learned that it was best to have a base with edges around it. Olivia’s “boat” held 48 marbles before going down. In art we outlined a picture of a fish and then went over it with a dark pastel crayon. Next art class, we will paint it with water colors. We think it will be quite beautiful. Miss Keith read us a book about the Magic School Bus taking the class on a trip to the water works. That’s where the water is gathered and cleaned and eventually sent to our homes, schools, offices, and churches. We are learning all kinds of exciting songs in music. We’re pretending to be butterflies, frogs, and all kind of spring insects. We sure do love singing and acting out stories.

We also love celebrations which always make for a fun day. Maggie turned 5 this week and treated us to Beignets. What a dessert. Our very own Coach Laura was our Mystery Reader. She read us a story about Roo, the Kangaroo who woke up real grumpy one day. His mom tried and tried to get him to smile because she said that always makes you feel better. Nothing she did worked. He still was grumpy. Finally she just gave up and they went for a walk. However, Roo’s mom wasn’t paying attention and they both fell in a mud hole. When Roo saw his mother covered in mud, guess what?? Yes, he finally smiled and he did feel happy. I guess that’s a good lesson for us too. Sullivan is our Friend of the Week. He likes to eat chicken, blue his favorite color, and he wants to be a policeman when he grows up.

We ended our week with book character dress up day. It was so much fun to see our friends dressed as one of their favorite characters. We had Peter Pan, Harry Potter, Fancy Nancy, Pinkalicious and many other splendid characters in our class. We hope everybody has a great week-end.

We continued to increase our knowledge of planting this week. Miss Anne read us the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Then we got to plant some beans. We are hoping that the beans will grow up to the sky! We will have to wait and see if they are magic beans like the ones Jack had. We also acted out the story. Carson was a fabulous Jack and Amelia was a very stern mother.

Hartt’s mom was nice enough to come in and teach us yoga on Monday. We learned that yoga is great for relaxation. We loved learning the different poses. They had silly names like downward dog, table top, and upward dog. We look forward to her coming back again to teach us some more poses.

In the art studio this week we decorated Easter eggs and Easter bags. Miss Keith reminded us that in spring it is fun to use pastel colors. In PE we played a fun Easter tag game. If you got tagged you had to hop like an Easter Bunny until someone came to help you with the magical egg. Then we played an Easter egg hunt game. We used the scooters to find eggs and bring them back to our baskets. We had to work with a partner to get as many eggs as we could.

We really enjoyed our Easter Party. We had an egg hunt and we each got to find ten eggs. Our favorite part was opening the eggs to see what goodies were inside! We got to eat two pieces of candy each. After we looked through our eggs we got to have a nice healthy snack for the Easter party. Then Reid’s mom read us an Easter book. We are all so excited for the long weekend to celebrate Easter and Passover with family and friends.

We are truly enjoying this beautiful spring weather. It is so nice to be outside even with the pollen. We are talking about what it means to be cooperative. Our children pride themselves on their cooperative and polite behavior. We read The Little Red Hen and when Abby heard that the Little Red Hen ate all the bread herself and didn’t share with her friends she said, “That is not right!” In our small groups the children talked about the things they do at home to be helpful. We compiled their responsibility chart. We are sending home three copies; one for the next three weeks, believing if you do anything for three weeks it will become a habit. On each Friday, the children will bring their charts to school and have the opportunity to celebrate all they do at home to be responsible. A real treat was when we read The Little Yellow Chicken. This is a precious book about a little chicken who wants to have a party and he asked his friends to help. As you might guess, the friends chose not to help. So the Little Yellow Chicken did all the work by himself. He didn’t know if he should allow his friends to come to the party since they refused to help. So he called his Grandmother, The Little Red Hen, for advice. Naturally she recommended he eat all the party food himself. The Little Yellow Chicken was kind so he opened the door and welcomed his friends to his party. The children were much happier with this ending.
With spring upon us, we are motivated to do some planting ourselves. The children are learning about coneflowers and seed pods. We first had to smash the seed pod to separate the seeds from the shaff . We planted those seed and we will plant coneflower seed that we bought. The question is which will grow better? We will be planting other flower seeds and beans. The children are very excited about all this spring planted.
The children will be deciding if light or water is more important to plants? Water will be our next focus. In science this week, Miss Anna continues her experiments about sink and float. The children are learning that things sink or float because of weight and density. This time she showed the class two beakers filled with water and two eggs. Most of the students predicted the first eggs would sink, which it did. Next she added salt to the water and we wondered how this would change the dynamics. We had mixed predictions but the egg in the salt water floated! We talked about how the ocean must be easier to float in. Stay tuned.

We hit the ground running this week. On Monday, we had our second annual Buddy Day. Our 5th grade Buddies came to our room first thing in the morning. We wrote letters of thanks to our service people who are stationed around the world. They are protecting other countries and also keeping us safe. We decorated the letters with beautiful stickers and pictures. We hope it makes them feel good knowing how much we appreciate them. Later in the morning, we went out to the field and participated in a bunch of relay activities. We did really well because we had done so many relays in preparing for the Pre-K Olympics. It is such an exciting time when the younger kids get to pair up with the older kids. Whew … what a busy week. On Tuesday, we had a visit from the Young Audience. They performed a play about the hare and the tortoise. We even got to participate in the play. Our assembly this week was all about community service and how Trinity School helps other people in many different areas. Of course those of us in Pre-K helped out with the pajama project. Each grade level did something that was helpful to other people. Some students went to the Food Bank, and the 6th grade students went to a school for special children and read to them. In art and science we are talking about water. Miss Anna had us predict whether certain items would sink or float. She used a tennis ball, a golf ball, a ping pong ball, a cork, a pine cone, and many other things. After we made our predictions, we put each item in water to see if we were right or wrong. We understand that if an item is light and has some air in it, it most likely will float. If it is dense or heavy, it will probably sink. In art, we used special paper and covered it with water. It was such fun to then use markers, pastels, and chalk to draw on the paper. It became squishy and vibrant. It was beautiful. We hope we get to do more of this in our own art studio.

We enjoyed celebrating with Carson during his Friend of the Week. Carson loves to read books about construction, and he wants to be a construction worker when he grows up. Maggie’s mom, Sarah, was our Mystery Reader and she read us a story about Tiddler, the fish. Be sure to check out our pictures on SmugMug. You will see a very interesting picture of Maggie showing us an unusual project. Well, in case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a Leprechauns Trap. Maggie told us it works by putting Lucky Charms in the box, the Leprechauns come to get the food and bam, he’s stuck to the stick. She said he was so tricky though that they didn’t get to see him but he definitely had eaten some food.

We have had an incredibly fun and busy week. We hope you enjoy the nice week-end.

We hope everybody had a nice spring break. We’re glad to be back in the routine and see all our friends. We had fun catching up on all the exciting places and activities everybody did on their week off. We are back on track with our friend of the week celebrations now that the Olympics are over. This week Luke was our friend of the week. We learned that he likes to play on the playground, go to Honolulu, and wants to be a professional singer when he grows up. We were also lucky to have Anna’s mom as our mystery reader this week. She read us a great story about Camilla the cupcake fairy.

In science this week we started to learn about water. We learned that water is made up of two parts water and one part hydrogen. We got to experiment with a pipette. We tested drops of water on different items such as wax paper, foil, newspaper, laminating paper, and tissue paper. We had to use our science eyes and observe the similarities and differences when we put droplets of water on each. The water droplets slid around quite easily on the wax paper and transparencies, but almost disappeared on the foil. On the newspaper and tissue paper the water saturated the paper and even changed some of the colors. We like predicting, experimenting, and then talking about the results. We will be doing more things with water as we begin our Water Unit.

In Handwriting Without Tears this week Miss Keith was teaching us how to write our numbers. Miss Keith told us that we only have to learn 10 different numbers to be able to write any number we want. We can’t believe we have already learned all 26 letters.

We are now learning to hear the ending sounds of words. This is very different from the beginning sounds, but we like listening for the sound. Our journal writing is really evolving as we are working on story mapping. We need to come up with stories that have setting, characters, problem, and solution. Check out our bulletin board to read the stories of the future authors of the world!

Don’t forget that Monday is a late arrival day. Carpool begins at 9am.

What an exciting week we have had! Starting with the Founder’s Day Assembly, the children learned that Trinity School is 60 years old and has been located in three different places. It was first located in Trinity Presbyterian Church. Moving from the church, Luke told the class Trinity was located on Northside Parkway in what is now The Girl’s School. Finally Trinity moved to the present location in our new magnificent building. Learning the history of Trinity School was fun, but seeing the time capsule that had been buried for 20 years was amazing. Twenty years ago each grade level added a memento to the capsule and you will never guess what that Pre-K class added. Unifix Cubes made into a complex pattern! The colors were black, yellow, and orange and Haddon guessed they made the pattern sometime near Halloween. Our children were surprised and noted they still love to make patterns with Unifix Cubes.

The next activity during Founder’s Day was even more exciting. Working with our Fifth Grade Buddy Class, they made a movie to go in the new time capsule using the new Apple computers. This capsule will be buried for 40 years. Carson was the first to figure out he would be 45 years old when this time capsule is opened.
The Olympics, as always, is a very special time for all Pre-K students. It is an opportunity for cooperation and collaboration. In Music they learned to sing the Olympic songs and in PE they practiced the relays and their special event activities. Mother Goose helped the children find books about their country in the Trinity library. During Art class they had the opportunity to study the works of famous artist and paint using different art techniques. In our classroom the children worked with their team to learn more about their country. The reports the children presented were excellent. The boys and girls painted like Monet using soft pastel colors and tried their hand at Cubism just like Picasso. John finished with our final report by constructing Stonehenge in the block area with help from his U. K. team. We have learned a lot!!!!
Noah, Jonathan’s cousin from London, made our learning more complete by sharing interest from his school. We even learned about an autumn hedgehog. Noah answered the same questions our children answer for their Friend of the Week chart. Our class really enjoyed reading Noah’s chart. He said what he likes to do is travel and go to professional soccer games in The U.K. and professional basketball games in The U.S. Noah’s favorite foods are pizza and pasta, sounds a lot like these boys and girls. Noah tells us that when he grows up he will be a sportsman and raise funds for charity. We had explanations and discussions about this.
The children were wonderful during the Olympic practices with everybody doing their part. We needed an extra practice for the gymnastic event. When we got back to the room we asked the children what they had learned. Hartt said, “We learned to move it, move it.” Another phrase that caught on during our practices was, “Let’s get quiet, it’s show time!” This group’s spirit of cooperation was outstanding. We are so proud of each and every child. Each child shared with the class what they thought they did best during The Olympic Presentation. We loved the confidence they showed.
The Olympic Party was a perfect ending to a perfect day. Many thanks to Jennifer, Suzi, Amy, Tish, and Jess our wonderful party moms.